


run me through

by plastiswafers



Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: First Kiss, First Time, Hand Jobs, M/M, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 15:41:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12844299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plastiswafers/pseuds/plastiswafers
Summary: Barry handles his emotions about as badly as he handles most things. Bruce, as always, is painfully inscrutable. It seems fitting that Barry would set himself up for disaster.





	run me through

It comes down to the fact that Barry knows himself. He can be dumb as shit sometimes, sure, and foot-in-mouth syndrome often feels like it might as well be renamed in his honor. But for all his ADHD free association flitting from topic to topic in what he’s sure is a truly obnoxious parallel to his powers, it’s not that he’s not aware. _Too_ aware, maybe. Stimuli all jumble together for only a moment until they’re not, until he’s left with a painfully accurate impression of himself and others and everything around and in-between.

(It’s why he’s good at what he does, he likes to think. No point in moving fast if you can’t see where to get out of the way.)

So they’re back in the Batcave one night, all of them in their big freaky supergroup that still makes Barry pinch himself every time it comes together. And it’s 2 a.m. and Barry’s been _running_ for what feels like days and weeks and months (but for probably around five hours or so), and he forgot to pack a Clif Bar this time (even though he picked up like, several boxes on his last trip to Trader Joe’s). 

So his blood sugar plummets, and his vision goes black around the edges, just a little bit, the little way it does when your blood sugar plummets because you’re a superhuman with the metabolism of some kind of alien cheetah. And his head nods, just a little bit, chin against chest and back up again before Barry’s even realized what’s happened.

So Bruce, Bruce who is speaking to them all in that authoritative, “I’m gonna act like I’m in charge even though Clark is literally right there” way of his—Bruce reaches out, puts his hand on the back of Barry’s head, gently, only for a second, like he’s checking in, like that’s a thing you do in the middle of mission debrief.

So Barry’s stomach drops. And he would like to pretend that he doesn’t know what this mean, that the fluttering feeling mixed in with the anxiety is as mystifying to him as whatever the hell Bruce just did, but Barry knows himself. There’s no confusion, no moment of existential uncertainty about What It All Means.

Barry knows exactly what it means. He closes his eyes, tightly, only for a second, and tries to ignore the chorus of _fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck_ that immediately begins echoing through his head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barry discovers quickly that Bruce Wayne the person has very little to do with Bruce Wayne the image.

He supposes this is intentional. Life must be easier when you have the option to pretend to be a dipshit instead of just naturally falling into the habit.

Clark is more typically towering but has a lot more on his plate—must come with the territory when you rise up from the dead. Arthur is all swaggering confidence, too cool to give a shit about Barry’s superhero growing pains. Diana is so effortlessly poised that Barry’s mostly too afraid to even speak to her. Victor’s just as lost as he is. (He talks to Victor a lot.)

Bruce probably has nothing better to do with his time. Bruce is there, observing. He checks up on Barry over text message and uses old man acronyms that make something jerk loose in his chest. He’s not as aloof as he should be, and not as aloof as Barry wants him to be. 

“You need to be more careful,” Bruce says.

Barry is bad at being careful. So is Bruce, come to think of it, though Bruce is better at carrying it. He hides bruises after battles the likes of which leave Barry moaning on the ground for a week.

“Watch yourself,” Bruce says.

He puts a hand on Barry’s arm, steadies him near the edge of a rooftop that Barry’s not sure he wouldn’t careen over without outside intervention. He tries not to be pleased that Bruce was paying attention.

“You’re doing well,” Bruce says.

Barry has dodges not one, not two, but three punches in a row from a Superman decidedly in practice mat mode. He wouldn’t let himself feel proud only Bruce is smiling, ever so slightly, and he compliments him and doesn’t even bother to be gruff about it. This tells him something good. This is a compliment he can take to heart.

(This is an image Barry can take to bed with him, the idea of Bruce smiling, smiling for him like he doesn’t even hate him or anything, and his hand will snake beneath his boxer briefs with only a moment of hesitation and he’ll jerk himself off with shame that doesn’t manifest until morning.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diana knows first, because of course she does. Diana knows everything first. He’s still not sure she’s telling the truth when she says that mind-reading isn’t part of her Amazonian super skill set.

The Central City Museum of Contemporary Art is having an opening, some photography exhibition with an artist’s statement that makes Barry’s head spin. Diana wrinkles her nose, diplomatically compliments the curator, but for all her classicist elitism there’s some part of her that must have grown attached to the vacuum of the museum space itself. She invites Barry to meet her at the museum cafe for tea. He makes a point of trying to get there early.

“Bruce is very handsome,” she says finally, once they’ve exhausted Barry’s extremely limited capacity for post-structuralist dialogue. She smiles at him in that way she does, where he feels like his heart is about to burst from his chest from the stress of that much magnanimous attention leveled his way all at once.

“I guess,” Barry says.

Diana raises an eyebrow. “Oh? Is he not?”

Bruce _is_ handsome, probably, in the sort of way that puts Barry one step from confronting his profound daddy issues if he thinks about it for too long. “It’s not about that,” Barry blurts out.

“Really,” Diana says with a smirk, like this pleases her. Barry’s mouth is a diabolical traitor and Diana is its evil co-conspirator.

Bruce is handsome, but he’s also intense, and he pays attention to Barry with a kind of laser-focus that twists his stomach up into a thousand miserable knots, because Bruce is a billionaire superhero mastermind and Barry is—Barry Allen, some dumbass college kid who just happened to get struck by lightning. And Bruce looks him directly in the eyes, and asks him how he’s doing all flippant and casual like people like Bruce Wayne just _ask_ him how he’s _doing_. And he puts his hand on the back of Barry’s head, laces his fingers through his curls and squeezes ever so gently.

He doesn’t think he can explain this to Diana; he doesn’t even know where he would start.

Diana proves once again that she can read minds. She reaches over the table and puts her hand over his, next to the crumbs of his hastily eaten meal.

“Be careful,” she says, like that’s easy. “Bruce has no idea what to do with you.”

He know she’s probably right. He has no idea what it means.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Foot: meet mouth.

(Mouth: meet way more than Barry had ever intended.)

He’s not sure when Bruce got there. It makes sense—somehow all roads lead back to Gotham City, even when Barry is determinedly trying not to follow them—but Barry is too preoccupied to let himself enjoy the moment too much. Mirror Master is a profound pain in the ass, the kind of stupid name and bag of dicks powers that confounds his super speed and leaves him on his toes and flat on his ass. _Mirrors_ , Barry bemoans. He always ends up with the stupidest nemeses.

Bruce puts an end to things quickly, with a smoke bomb that quickly gives way to a to a nauseous, disorienting strobe. Scudder succumbs quickly; Bruce ties him up and leaves him for Gordon with all the casualness of a seasoned pro.

In the Batmobile (because Bruce is giving him a ride home, because Barry could run but he’s tired, and hungry, and he doesn’t know what happens if he tries to push himself too far on fumes but he doesn’t want), Barry is happy but also a little ashamed. Happy because Scudder’s off the streets, at least for now. Ashamed because it took Bruce’s intervention to put him there.

“Sorry you had to bail me out,” Barry says suddenly. Bruce drives really, really fast. It does nothing to help his adrenaline levels and still-racing heartbeat.

Bruce looks at him out of the corner of his eye. Barry can’t read that look. He can’t read any of Bruce’s looks. “I wouldn’t have been able to get him without you distracting him,” Bruce says. “You did fine. More than fine. Don’t sell yourself short.”

He tries not to preen under the praise. He fails. He hopes Bruce isn’t watching (he wonders if Bruce is watching).

It’s not long before they’re back at Barry’s place. He doesn’t think he saw Bruce using GPS. Maybe that means Bruce has memorized how to get to where he lives. Or maybe he uses some map with technology beyond what Barry can comprehend. Or maybe Bruce is just such a paranoid weirdo that his memorization of addresses means absolutely nothing beyond a personal quirk.

He realizes after way too long that he’s been staring. Bruce is looking at him with a funny expression in his eye; he’s taken off the cowl, for better peripheral vision or else to just be comfortable. This is distinctly bad. Barry loves it when he takes off the cowl but the suit’s still on. It gives him all the ambiance of Batman but expression (the face, the jawline, the eyes) of Bruce. It’s a bad look. It’s a dangerous look.

Later he’ll blame it on the adrenaline—that, and his own profound, obfuscating stupidity, because Barry is truly the stupidest piece of shit of the planet. He lunges forward across the seat; his coordination is spectacularly bad, inexcusably so for someone who can fine-tune his actions down to the nanosecond. Barry’s lips smash against Bruce’s off-kilter and uncomfortable, bottom lip matched to top lip in a way that really, really does not work.

It’s barely a kiss, but way too much of a kiss. He freezes for too long before he has the sense to pull back.

“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.” Barry’s eyes go painfully wide. He’s more than a deer caught in the headlights. He’s the deer, and he’s the headlights, and he’s roadkill all at once. “Please never look at me or speak to me ever, ever again.”

Not for the first time, he’s incredibly grateful for his speed. He’s out of the car and locked inside before he can catch any look of shock or disgust.

(Barry can handle a lot. He can’t handle that.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barry turns off his phone for a couple of days. He contemplates throwing it away, into perhaps a ditch or an extremely full dumpster, but he’s embarrassed, not stupid. Phones cost money, a lot of money that he doesn’t have. Not for the first time this week, he is acutely reminded that he is not Bruce Wayne and not operating anywhere near his level.

He goes for a run—a real run, the kind he might have tried about once a year before a freak accident had rendered the point moot. He slows down his nervous system as best he can, tries to put the least possible effort into making his body move; he concentrates on the mechanical form of his arms moving and his feet hitting the ground, tries to make his lungs burn with the effort of it all. He almost sweats. It’s not the real deal, not really. But he can deal with the performance of the thing just this once.

Central City’s grid system makes it easy to plan a path. He zigs and zags, confident in the knowledge that he can always zip back home the second it gets too much for him. It doesn’t get too much for him. He stays out later than intended, past sundown, when it starts to get almost cold and he’s grateful for the hoodie he’s tied around his waist.

Home calls, eventually.

(It’s because he gets hungry. He is always, always hungry.)

Barry opens the door and his immediate thought is that he should have expected this. Because Bruce is there, again, sitting in what Barry privately thinks of as the Lesser Chair, looking at Barry pensively like he’s been planning this for hours but still has no idea what to say. He’s dressed in a suit. It fits well, this suit. It’s an unfair suit. It shouldn’t be putting Barry in this position. He curses the universe yet again.

“I thought I asked you never to look at me again,” Barry says.

This is entirely more dickish than he intended it to be. Bruce’s eyebrows shoot upwards immediately. Barry freezes in the doorway of his makeshift apartment, barely takes the time to close the door behind him.

“Sorry,” Barry says. “Didn’t—mean it like that. But. You know. I also kind of really don’t want you to see me ever again. Especially not before I have the chance to personally melt into the ground and become one with the Earth’s magma core instead of being a human being who does extremely ill-advised shit.”

Now Bruce looks thoughtful, almost disappointed. Except he can’t look disappointed, because Barry is totally projecting and he has no idea what the fuck is going on in the labyrinthine mind of Bruce Wayne anyway.

“So it was ill-advised,” Bruce says. “You regret kissing me?”

Hearing it articulated out loud makes Barry feel worse than ever. Maybe before he could pretend it was some horrifying wet dream that had somehow morphed into his deepest nightmare. This is not a nightmare. This is Bruce Wayne in the flesh.

“So. Much,” Barry stresses. “That was just—so? Inappropriate? And sexual harass-y? And if you want to kick me off the team and banish me to like, another dimension, or kill me like Superman or whatever, I totally understand, and I accept it, and I’m sorry, and—”

Bruce stands up and the words immediately die in Barry’s mouth. He wasn’t actually expecting that Bruce would take physical revenge, but it’s an appropriate punishment, really, for Barry crossing the most blatant Do Not Cross line of all of human existence. His eyes squeeze shut; he tries to swallow the lump in his throat. He does his best to prepare himself for the inevitable suplex with grace.

Bruce is way too close to him; he can feel the body heat emanating in miserably tantalizing waves. Barry’s not lying prone on the ground, at least not yet. His eyes open slowly, unwillingly.

Bruce is _way_ too close. He reaches up and puts a hand on Barry’s face, cups his jaw with painful precision.

(It’s this moment that gives him hope. Barry knows himself. He has a _great_ jaw.)

“You’re really young,” Bruce says simply.

“Not a kid,” Barry says immediately, responding to a rehearsed fantasy conversation that doesn’t quite match up with the words coming out of Bruce’s mouth. “I mean—I’m young, obviously, or whatever. Like, I’m sure you know when my birthday is and probably my birth chart if you gave a shit about that kind of thing. But not like, _really_ young. Just regular young. Acceptable young. Plausible and fun kind of young. Not sex scandal kind of young.”

Barry’s the type of person who avoids eye contact when he doesn’t know what to do. He would look everywhere in the world but Bruce Wayne if he could, but Bruce is standing too close to him, and looking at Barry with a level of intensity that makes his stomach flip several times over.

“Don’t regret this,” Bruce says. Not _don’t make me regret this._ Don’t regret this. Barry’s not sure what he’s supposed to be regretting, though he has a prayer, a niggling idea, and he wouldn’t regret even if he tried, couldn’t regret any of this. And he thinks he’ll say so, opens his mouth to tell Bruce that it’s okay, it’s really okay, it’s more than okay, it’s something he’s been thinking about before he falls asleep every single night for a month—

And Bruce kisses him. He kisses properly, fully on the mouth, one hand on the back of Barry’s head and another at the small of his back and pressing the two of their bodies flush together in a way that immediately makes Barry aware of _just_ how much he wanted this. Bruce is a much better kisser than Barry is; Bruce takes the lead and Barry obliges, happily, lets Bruce slip his tongue into his mouth with decisive power and lets himself melt against the wall of muscle like a girl on the cover of a romance novel. It’s not a bad role, he decides. He thinks he can live with this.

Bruce pulls away to kiss at his jawline (Barry has a _great_ jawline) and Barry tries his best to even out his breathing. He fails. He feels himself wrap his arms tighter around Bruce, wants to touch him but isn’t sure where, has no idea where he’s even supposed to start. “Easy,” Bruce says, but he smiles into Barry’s skin. Barry flushes with embarrassment all the same. He has no idea what he’s doing. It’s fitting that Bruce would notice.

Bruce notices this too. He knows way too much about people, and too much about Barry to be comfortable. Barry’s pretty sure he doesn’t know anything about anyone or anything, including himself. “Don’t,” Bruce says. One word at a time seems to be his thing. He kisses at Barry’s ear, gently, and Barry feels his dick twitch, feels the embarrassment melt back into desire.

“You’re so—beautiful,” Bruce says, like he’s not sure what word to fill in the blank. “Wanted to do this for too long. Shouldn’t be doing this. You should be running in the other direction, you know that?”

Barry thinks he knows this, in some kind of detached observer way, but in the practical sense it means nothing. He’s not stupid. He knows himself. He’s not going to give up the opportunity to get his hands on Bruce Wayne. “Don’t care,” he breathes. “Just want—you to kiss me.”

He wants more to be kissed. Bruce seems to know what he means. Bruce knows fucking everything. He’s back to kissing Barry directly and Barry kisses back this time, more decisive but still questioning, arms wrapped comfortably around Bruce’s shoulders where Bruce’s hands have moved thrillingly, terrifyingly to squeeze his ass. He tries not to grind upward, fails, moans just a little bit into Bruce’s mouth. He’s fooled around before, kissed more than his fair share of boys. This isn’t fooling around.

It takes Barry a moment to realize that they’re mobile. Bruce is backing them up, slowly, finding one of the few flat surfaces on Barry’s wall with no electronic adornments blocking their way, just a _Blade Runner_ poster tacked up with dorm room pretension that Barry’s immediately questioning. Bruce may have spatial awareness, but Barry doesn’t think he’s even noticed.

His hands are moving now (regrettably, at first); they slide up Barry’s shirt, make him gasp, touch his nipples in a way that makes him entirely reconsider the possibilities contained therein, but slip downward just as quickly. His hands graze the waistband of Barry’s sweatpants; they’re only in the _vicinity_ of his cock but Barry’s wanting so badly that he’s seeing stars, his vision’s going black not with hunger but with desire.

“Tell me to stop,” Bruce says, and Barry freezes, but Bruce’s hand dips beneath his boxers and his calloused fingers reach Barry’s cock firmly but gently. His other hand is back on Barry’s face, pushing the hair out of his eyes, rubbing his temple and his cheekbone with a thumb. “You want to stop you say so, okay?”

And Barry should be grateful that Bruce is treating him with care, and he is, really, or will be, when he thinks about it later, but Barry is bad with care. He kisses Bruce this time, sharply, insistently, and arches his hips with all of his impatient insistence into Bruce’s waiting palm. “Stop talking,” Barry says. It feels weird to be the one to command silence. “Keep _going_.”

And Bruce’s pace is languid, and he kisses Barry with a deliberation that must be easier now that he’s gotten all his desperation out. His hand twists around Barry’s cock, at first too slow to be kind and then slow fast Barry think he might scream—and then back to slow, miserably, in a way that makes Barry groan despite himself and push his body as close to Bruce’s as he can possibly manage, to try to get himself off on Bruce’s presence alone.

Because the reality is that Barry isn’t going to last that long. He’d like to pretend otherwise, but he’s been waiting for this for longer than is acceptable, and every moment of desperate anticipation just makes the reality that much more difficult to resist.

“I’m—” he says, but it’s too hard to get the words out before he gasps again. Bruce seems to know what he means; he won’t even do him the courtesy of slowing down, letting Barry pretend that he can hold out for longer than these few precious moments. The firmness of Bruce’s hand on his cock is almost too much to bear, and Bruce is kissing him even more insistently; Barry can barely respond more than to let the feeling just wash over him, and then the pressure is too much, deep in him and building further than he knew it could build.

And he comes with a strangled moan, all over Bruce’s hand in a way that should be embarrassing but is mostly just really fucking hot. Bruce keeps his hand moving, using the wetness of Barry’s come to keep his cock slick and kissing Barry’s lips, his neck, his jaw line once again.

Barry calms down, finally. He dares to open his eyes. Bruce is looking at him in that way he always does, where Barry feels like he’s naked (not just half-naked, like now). His lips are red and his hair is a mess. Barry must have been running his fingers through his hair; he doesn’t remember doing that. If this is Bruce, he shudders to think of the picture he must paint himself.

For the first time, Bruce smiles. This is the smile that Barry likes, the one that he had tried and failed not to think about for too long. He’s pressed up against Barry’s hip, holding him up against the wall with casual ease. Barry can feel the evidence of Bruce’s own reaction. He doesn’t even know where to _begin_ with that.

Bruce runs his hand across Barry’s face, again, this time the one wet with Barry’s own orgasm. It should probably gross him out. Barry wants nothing more than for Bruce to do it again.

“So,” Bruce says. “Still want to melt yourself into the earth’s core?”

“Absolutely,” Barry says immediately. He means it, but in a different way. Bruce kisses him, again; Barry thinks he understands.


End file.
